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Redfall.rar
Latest version
Categories: free version
Size:78 GB
As a fan of Arkane's studio and his previous works, I was excited about the game Redfall, although there were some fears that it would deviate from the identity that we have been accustomed to since 2012, but here we are talking about a vampire game in an open world with the distinctive character of Arkane, so we certainly expect everything to go well. Unfortunately, the end result was completely the opposite, and the game Redfall could not even reach half the level of the previous studio games, and it is increasingly confirmed that presenting new ideas does not always bear fruit, especially when those ideas are conflicting and you do not know what you want to reach exactly!
The story is not highlighted enough in Redfall
We are used to in all Arkane games that the story has the main focus, and the gameplay and the game world are designed to serve this story, but the matter is different here with Redfall, as the game begins as you wake up in an abandoned ship to find that the city of Redfall has become full of vampires and their followers, and you must escape And search for a safe haven to start rallying the survivors to stand against the vampires and take back the city of Redfall once again.
At first glance, the story seems interesting, but the studio couldn't keep up the enthusiasm with which the game begins, as you will always ask yourself where the vampires came from, why they took over the city of Redfall in particular, and why they have followers everywhere. All these questions the game tries to answer by leaving some written documents and audio recordings, but this came with a negative effect as you are not connected in any way to the characters or the world, especially since all of the survivors suddenly deal with the situation of vampires as something normal, and you never feel There are moments of fear or excitement in the events of the whole story.
Sometimes you will find that the regions of the world have been designed professionally to tell you a distinct story that you want to know without having to sit in front of a cinematic scene, but it is unbearable here, especially with the absence of any interesting characters, whether playable characters, side characters, or even enemies and masters Vampires that you will not see throughout the events of the game unless you confront them as they transform into scary-looking monsters. How am I supposed to feel or relate to the characters' feelings when you're telling the story by viewing the characters as just superficial things that don't get any focus!
In general, the story of Redfall is not long, you can finish it within about 12-14 hours of play, and the Arkane studio itself knows that the game is relatively short compared to its recent projects, so it makes you finish some side missions in order to complete the story, and that is a point that I will talk about more clearly later. in review.
Are we ahead or behind in gameplay, Arkane?
Looter Shooter game with a weak sense of weapons and action
Although all previous Arkane games did not contain long-range confrontations, they perfected the idea with Deathloop by offering a violent game experience with weapons that makes you want to try different types to see how much damage you inflict on enemies and how to destroy them and see blood splatter in front of you everywhere. The experience was great from Arkane Lyon Studio, but Arkane Austin couldn't create the same fun feeling with Redfall, and most of the time you'll feel like you're holding in your hand the pistols or shotguns that kids play in the streets during the holiday celebrations!
The sense of movement and weapons in general is not good in the game, with many problems in several incomplete animations, especially when you decide to play stealth and stealth, and you find that when you approach the enemy and kill him, an animation occurs that makes you feel like you have suddenly returned to the PlayStation 2 generation!
Add to this the fact that it's a Looter Shooter experience which means you'll want to switch up your weapons when you move to any new area and look for more higher-level weapons to take on vampires, and sometimes the overall experience becomes Borderlands-like. This does not mean that the Borderlands world and the game experience in it is bad, not at all, but rather the problem here is that Redfall could not even offer the same Borderlands sense of play and way of looting weapons.
The capabilities here are not good enough
Each of the previous Arkane games offers you 5 or more supernatural abilities to take advantage of during the gameplay, and you can enjoy all these abilities at any time during the game by switching between them, but the matter here is different with Redfall where you can choose only one character at the beginning of the game and you cannot switch Among them later, like Gotham Knights did, for example!
The problem here is that each of the four characters has two main abilities, with the ultimate ability being activated over time during gameplay. This means you'll be stuck with just three abilities from start to finish, or if you're bored you'll have to start the game over again in order to get to try out the abilities of the other three characters. Of course, each of your three abilities can be upgraded and improved, but they are normal upgrades in a normal skill tree that we see in any game.
The abilities of the four personalities are divided into:
Jacob: He has the ability to disappear for a period of time to hide from enemies, and the second ability enables him to send a crow to scout the area and inform all enemies in front of you. As for the maximum ability, he can obtain powerful snipers that kill enemies quickly, as sniping proves them.
Layla: She has the ability to bring a defensive parachute to deflect enemy attacks, and she can also create an elevator out of thin air to attack enemies from above. As for the supernatural ability here, she summons her former lover, who helps her fight the enemies.
Remy: Her first ability is to throw C4 bombs to kill enemies, and her second ability is to summon a small robot that distracts the enemies so that she can attack her, while the super ability establishes a control point and everyone within her range is healed or revived
Defender: He shoots an arrow that emits a chain of lightning to damage enemies, he can also throw a device he made himself that gives him the ability to move quickly and instantly to a specific location, and the super ability will place an emitter of ultraviolet rays in front of him, which causes enemies to scale in his path, and this is a skill Great for crowd control
The game here indirectly forces you to experience it in a cooperative way with other players if you want to enjoy all the capabilities because if you enter with three other friends, you will have 12 capabilities that you can benefit from during the gameplay and completing tasks. Personally, I would have preferred that the game leave me the freedom to change between characters at any time I want during the game, especially since some missions feel that other characters with other abilities will be more efficient than the character you chose. Or at least give me all the abilities while trying the game individually, and tell me that I can only choose 5 abilities, for example, among them at one time.
Ridiculous co-op experience
Speaking of the co-op experience, it's not fun in Redfall. Yes, sometimes you will find that roaming the world and completing tasks with your friends has a good feeling (at least better than trying the game individually), but in general, the cooperative experience was not special here, especially since all characters, for example, are able to revive team members who are knocked down. Which makes the role of the healer, Remy, much less than expected, as it is possible to do the same thing using the treatment kit that all characters have!
What makes the co-op experience annoying and ridiculous at the same time is that only the person hosting the game (the host) gets to progress in the story and missions in their own world, and if you are one of the people who are invited, all you keep are your weapons And your level, but when you return to your own world again you will have to start all the missions from scratch again, which is a strange and illogical decision in a game that is being advertised as a mainly COOP experience.
This is stupidity, not artificial intelligence!
Artificial intelligence here in the game is almost non-existent, especially when confronting ordinary human enemies. Suddenly you find them falling from the sky in a way that reminds me of the police in Cyberpunk 2077, and most of the time their weapons don't even hit you, and there is a huge amount of problems and glitz that makes it funny to confront them, especially when they fall from the upper floors and suddenly you find them shooting at you from below the surface of the earth.
Fighting vampires themselves was fine, but over time most vampires become weak against your powerful weapons, and the stake thrower can kill most of the vampires you will encounter in the game with one or two shots, making them very easy to get rid of. The game shines only in the confrontations of the vampire lords (bosses) as they offer a distinct gaming experience, each arena has its own character and each boss has its own abilities, and here you will find yourself dying more than once before you can defeat this boss. Unfortunately, there aren't many of these bosses in the Redfall universe, and you'll rarely feel the same way encountering them during a normal gameplay experience.
World design is brilliant at times, and at other times unacceptable!
The Redfall map is divided into two areas, the first area contains the initial missions of the story events and teaches you the basics of gameplay and exploration, while the second map contains the continuation of the story, the final events and the confrontation of most of the bosses. My problem with this design is that when you go to the second map, you can never go back to the first map, and this is an idea that I find illogical and not good at all, so the Arkane studio was supposed to leave the players free to move between the two maps at any time, especially if I wanted to go back and explore Other areas of the first map. Yes there is a warning that you won't be able to go back to the first map, but overall it's a bad idea!
So how are the Redfall quests going? In short, your main goal in the game world is to free the city from the control of vampires, so you will go on many missions to search for clues about the whereabouts and time of the vampire leaders. You will learn more details about the story and the past of the game as the game focuses on building the world itself more than the cinematic scenes, This is something the studio has done well in all of its previous games. The main missions of the story and the penetration more and more into the world of vampires has its own character, and there are a group of wonderful missions that are designed with great professionalism and focus on leaving the freedom of exploration to the player to finish the mission in the appropriate way. In addition, the vampire lairs scattered all over the map offer you a distinctly linear gaming experience, with breathtaking encounters with the vampire lords, and here the full brilliance of the game appears in the gameplay and the use of abilities.
Unfortunately, not everything about the design of the world is positive, as the world itself is not attractive to the eye either in terms of graphics or the general design of the areas. You feel that you are in a city that you have seen previously in many games, and the general atmosphere of the game is similar to Far Cry, especially since Redfall draws many ideas from recent Ubisoft games that many players have criticized. For example, in order to fight a vampire lord, you must collect three skulls, and those skulls are in the safe house missions, and to get to the skull, you must complete two missions. In short, this means that if you want to complete the story and confront this boss, you must complete six side missions first to get the required skulls, and those things were unacceptable and boring in games like Assassin's Creed Origins and Odyssey, and here we see it repeated with Redfall!
There was a big opportunity that the Arkane studio could take advantage of with the design of the world and the stages of the game, but it decided to go towards making an experience similar to the last Ubisoft worlds, which were not the best anyway, and the result is a much less world experience than the previous studio worlds where they failed in the general design, and even failed. In making you interested in exploring around the world to find out the details and secrets scattered around you, especially since the world lacks the distinctive interdependence and interdependence that we are accustomed to from studio games.
Bad graphics, worse technical performance
Arkane Studio has always been known to focus on providing a distinctive art direction to its games rather than creating a realistic graphical experience, and we love the studio for that reason, but the art direction is always accompanied by beautiful graphic design that is easy on the eyes and makes you contemplate every corner of these unique worlds. But here the matter is completely different with Redfall, although it is based on the Unreal Engine 4 engine that provides improvements for developers in the development process, but the studio could not exploit it in the same way that they exploited their own Void engine.
Yes, the Redfall game has a distinctive artistic direction and the design of the city itself has a distinctive idea, but this design comes with graphics that sometimes make it a game out of the PlayStation 3 generation. This is not a new generation game in any way, and there is nothing in it that suggests that it is such a demanding game to be released on the new generation only and needs all those gigantic specifications on the PC. The graphics are extremely poor, and even when playing the game on the highest settings I found myself going back and forth to the menu to make sure that the game was indeed running on high settings!
At the end of the game, I arrived at one of the vampires' dens while I was playing with my friend, and I remembered that the same scene I had seen previously in a promotional image for the game, so I decided to take a picture to compare it with the drawings that the studio had previously shown, and indeed my suspicion was right, as you can see the difference Between the two pictures and how Downgrade happened to the game in terms of lighting and shadows.
The game's graphics could benefit if the technical performance was acceptable, but it's far from that here. My experience of the game was on a medium computer with the following specifications:
Intel Core I3 10100F processor
16 GB of RAM DDR4 with a frequency of 2666 MHz
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050
NVMe M.2 SSD storage
I entered the game and set it to high settings with a resolution of 1080p, and at first I found that the frames ranged between 45 and 60 and this was very acceptable to me, but it did not last in this case for long, as soon as I went to the open world I found that the game had chopping that continued when moving to any new area All of a sudden you find the frames are dropping to 30 frames per second for no reason. Even in some scenes where there was nothing on the screen to prepare for frame drops, I was surprised once that the game became running at 15fps due to "some smoke in the environment"!
I decided at that time to try the image upscaling technology, as the game contains all the technologies that you could ask for, such as Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS. I put the game on DLSS in quality mode and found that the performance didn't make any difference, and the picture quality got worse. A reviewer friend of mine was trying the game on an RTX 3060 and put the game on DLSS in performance mode, and he also didn't find any performance improvements, and it seems like there's no such thing as there right now. I was also shocked when I realized that the game was consuming between 60-80% of the performance of the graphics card most of the time, and this is a problem that has become abnormally present in new generation games, and it has become boring to find the game unable to work as required because the studio did not polish it properly . Now I know why the game is only running at 30 frames per second on Xbox Series X|S, since the problem is not with the hardware or its hardware, but with the studio itself!
The game is also full of technical problems and glitches that appear all over the world, and the matter here is not only related to the stupidity of artificial intelligence, as I mentioned earlier, but the game itself has a lot of things that feel wrong, such as things flying everywhere, or characters becoming in the T pose , and other wondrous things that take you out of the experience mode. Fortunately, the game has no glitz to completely ruin the experience, and the crash only happened once in the entire 15+ hours of gameplay.
An immersive soundtrack underlined by the overall acoustics design
I think the most conscientious person who has done their work with Redfall is composer Jongnic Bontemps who delivered some of the best music I heard in 2023 that the main menu music will make you want to sit and listen to it for long periods. The same applies to the design of the game's music itself, whether you're in the safe house or navigating the environment, and the music really shines when you engage in dogfights with a large group of enemies, or when you face off against vampire lords. I hope to hear more Jongnic Bontemps melodies in more games in the near future!
Unfortunately, the same admiration for the soundtrack cannot be applied to the rest of the game's audio, specifically the voice acting. Each of the four main characters has a normal voice and you feel that the character has no particular sense or feature. Compare Redfall's main and side characters to other game characters from the studio like Deathloop and you'll see the difference. Just hearing Colt and Juliana's dialogues in Deathloop made me smile, but with Redfall, all the characters here, even the enemies, were ordinary, and they couldn't draw me into the story or the dialogues you hear around you everywhere.
The sound design of the game itself is generally not good enough and almost cartoonish in everything which makes the feel of the weapons unacceptable at times, some of the guns feel like you're shooting beads rather than live bullets to kill vampires.
Speaking of acoustics and voice acting, it should be clarified that the game Redfall is fully translated into Arabic in texts and menus, and as usual with recent Bethesda games, the translation here is great and if you are weak in the English language, do not worry because the translation team here explains everything in simple terms that are easy to understand for all players of all ages .
How could Redfall have been an ideal experience?
When I finished Redfall and was sitting traumatized by the experience in front of a list of developer names, I decided to think about the studio's previous projects, and this is how the perfect Redfall came to mind:
The game was supposed to become a linear experience with a world divided into areas that you visit gradually in order to complete missions
It should have focused on the Immersive Sim elements and made shooting a secondary thing without the need for a sterile Loot system
The world and atmosphere of the game was supposed to become more dark and terrifying than it is
The entire game had to take place at night
There should have been more focus on the game's story and creating interesting drama
It would have been advisable to move away from the design of Ubisoft's missions and make the player compulsorily complete side missions to continue the story.
When you combine all these elements together in your mind, you will find that this is the perfect Redfall game that the Arkane studio was supposed to work on, and I think if it was in the way I imagined it, it would have become a masterpiece that joins the studio's work in being one of the best games that are presented An interesting world with a distinctive story and gameplay that immerses you and serves this world.
in the end
Looking at Redfall, you see an untapped world of creative storytelling with the Arkane gameplay we've respected and adored for the past decade, and the final product before us speaks to how much the studio flopped through the development process, and shows that the studio themselves didn't know what game they were working on. The game mixes many elements from different games, but unfortunately it could not make the perfect mixture, which was likely to become the new shift for the studio and the way it made its games. In sum, Arkane Studio wanted to offer something new, but it failed to maintain its own identity, making Redfall its worst work so far, which is an absolutely unfortunate start for the studio after it came under the umbrella of Xbox.
Advantages
The design of the world itself sometimes works out well in story missions
Taking on the vampire lords is cool and shows the power of the gameplay
A soundtrack of its best that conveys the feeling of the world
Excellent Arabic translation
The artistic direction is beautiful
Defects
One of the weakest stories offered by the studio
Characters I couldn't love or relate to
Gameplay suffers most of the time
The world design lacks the overlap and connectivity we are used to
Super abilities don't serve the gameplay well
Poor co-op experience with issues to be resolved
The game has stupidity, not artificial intelligence
Weak graphics, despite the beauty of the artistic direction
The game suffers technically on PC
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